The Kestron Lenses

conclusion

by Jonathan M. Sweet

“The Kestron Lenses” began in issue 111.
Part 5 appeared in issue 115.

Suddenly she felt a hand grab her thick long blondish-brown hair and twist it around its fingers. Her head was yanked back, and she looked into the upside-down face and shoulders of a man. He was heavily backlit by a security light that outlined him in a rusty orange nimbus, but she could tell he was young, had unkempt hair, and wore glasses. His breathing was shallow and ragged, almost like a sleeper’s.

Gardener tried to scream, but her head was bent so far back against her shoulder blades that all that came from her taut vocal cords was a thin whine... followed by a gurgle as a thin blade sliced into the meat of her throat.

The last thing she saw was a lumpy grey hand that felt like cloth smear itself on her chin, throat, and breasts, absorbing her blood.

Then she died.

Harry awoke cold, damp, and completely unaware of where he was or how he’d gotten there. His head was a miserable mass of pain, and when he rolled over, every joint screamed. All he recalled was a half-hazy vision of a woman walking past the abandoned computer lab building. He’d seen a man leap out of the shadows and attack her... but nothing else, not even a name. All he knew was that he was lying somewhere in the woods on the outskirts of the campus.

He looked around to get his bearings and saw a barbed-wire fence behind him marking off a close-knit grove of trees, sure to lose for days a man foolish enough to wander in. He looked down just then and noticed the blood on his sock-wrapped hands and shirtfront.

I killed again. The blackouts are getting worse. Usually I’m in control right up until the moment I do it, but this time it was so total I didn’t even plan a strategy. B.J. and Carolyn were conscious efforts... and after Carolyn I was in control enough to go back to the party and set up an alibi. Kirk... well, he was an accident — I think. Maybe subconsciously I wanted to hurt him to keep him from telling, but I never meant for him to die.

This is different. What control I had before is gone. The last thing I remember was pushing Kirk down the stairs and running back to my room Monday morning. He checked his watch and noted it was after ten on Tuesday. A whole day? I can’t have this. I’ve been skipping classes lately too much, and somebody will come looking for me before too long if I’m not more careful.

His glasses had come askew and were sitting on his chin. Harry quickly removed them (grimacing again at their slick, chilly feel) and jammed them into the pocket of his jacket, which was partly unzipped. He pulled himself to his feet, dusted errant grass off his pants, yanked the stained socks off his hands and hurled them into the copse.

He walked around a bit to get his bearings and soon realized he was not far from Faulkner Hall — he could see the edge of its roof from his vantage point. Quickly he crossed the railroad tracks onto Aglet Street, took a couple of minor side-roads to escape attention, and crept across the quad to the dorm. Thankfully the few people milling about didn’t spot him, and he was able to duck into a side-door without anyone noticing his haggard appearance or his bloody shirt.

Hunched over, he made his way up the back stairs and down the hall to his room. I can’t stay on campus. I’ll take the ferry back to Champagne Island at noon and stay away from Fulkes for the rest of the week. Maybe next week as well. I’ll let things blow over before I come back. Tell the registrar I needed some personal days. He noticed the tremor in his hands and he fumbled with his door key. He turned to make sure no one was behind him as he opened the door and slipped in.

“Hello, Harold.”

Harry let out a strangled scream and his head jerked around. There lay Shad Hutch on his bed, arms behind his head, languishing comfortably. He wore a light yellow short-sleeved shirt and blue tie, tan slacks, and leather oxblood shoes, and was grinning at Harry. His left top incisor was gold and had S.H. carved in it. Harry had never noticed this odd little touch before.

“How... ?”

“...did I get here?” finished Shad gently, sitting up. “I had the man at the front desk admit me. I told him you were ill and I was a concerned friend. I’ve been waiting for you since seven-thirty. My, you are a slovenly one, aren’t you?”

Harry recalled his bloody shirt and promptly removed it and his jacket. “What’s this about, Shad?”

“It’s about your recent success.” Shad passed Harry the laundry basket, and numbly he dropped in the shirt and jacket. “I couldn’t help but notice how an unexplained murder would preface a news story from you. The Edwin Wayne story right after that Fagala girl died just down the hall, the Wells piece right after Carolyn Monroe is fished out of that lake near the Pavilion and you were the last one seen with her, and a friend of yours found lying on the stairs in Williams Hall with a broken neck.

“And last night Dr. Gardener was found with her throat cut in the alley two buildings away from Williams Hall.”

“Near the old comp lab?”

“Yes. I’m sure the DNA test of the blood on that shirt in that basket will confirm my suspicions. You’ve been padding your resume, my friend — through murder.”

Harry remained silent.

“Some source feeds you information, and in exchange, you do their dirty work for them. That’s sad. You knew that without a good portfolio you’d be lucky to get an internship or work in the mailroom at a reputable paper. You weren’t going to go through all that trouble for a degree just to waste your life writing about dog shows and church potlucks on page eight of the Metro Section.

“So you become a killer-for-hire to get the really good stories. With a sheepskin and a big award in your back pocket you’d be a god, wouldn’t you? How long did you think it could go on before someone put two and two together?”

“What do you want? Are you going to tell on me?”

“I could.” Shad grinned again, exposing that weirdly out-of-character gold tooth. “But I can pad my pocket too. You can kill a thousand people, for all I care, and become big as Royko or Barry or Woodward and Bernstein. But I demand a slice of the pie for me.

“I figure your average reporter’s starting salary is twelve, fifteen thousand a year. In exchange for my silence, I want eighty percent of your paycheck a week.”

“What? You’re mad. That only leaves me with $3,000 a year. That’s starvation wages! I’d make more drawing welfare.”

“You’d make less in prison. Especially if they send you to the chair. Now be reasonable. I figure forty or forty-five years until you retire... meaning out of about seven thousand dollars over your lifetime, I take about $540,000.”

“That’s extortion!”

“I prefer to call it ‘creative bargaining’.” Shad’s voice was low.

“What if I kill you right now?”

“You could. However, I mailed my brother a letter this morning right after I got done viewing Dr. Gardener’s body and getting statements. I sealed a small envelope inside the larger one with instructions for it not to be opened unless I turn up dead or if he doesn’t hear from me between now and June 15. In it is the truth about you and orders to deliver it to the police. To kill me would sign your own death warrant.”

Harry again said nothing, merely stared at his hands. They were like a stranger’s to him, with their dirt-streaked knuckles and the dry blood caked under the fingernails, and the way they perpetually shook. At length he croaked, “No deal.”

“I could pick up that phone this minute and turn you over to the police.”

“I wish you would.”

“Aw. What’s the matter? The hired gun wants out? Then tell me,” demanded Shad, “who are you working for?”

“No one.”

“Don’t lie.” Shad’s brow was dark with rage as he leaned forward and stared into Harry’s pallid face. “Do you think I’m a moron? I’m just that dumb schlub who wants to spend his life editing copy on a fourth-rate local rag or some small-press literary magazine nobody outside a mailing list ever reads? I’m not. No reporter is lucky enough to get your kind of story without help. You have inside information, and I want to be a part of it.”

“You don’t want to be part of nothing I’m a part of.”

“Tell me.” Shad’s face was inches from Harry’s; he could see the beginnings of grey hairs in Shad’s mustache and the periods after the S and the H etched in his gold tooth. “Do you go to them, or do they come to you? Do you have a contact’s phone number, or do you have an agreed-on rendezvous point?”

Harry laughed then, a low gobbling sound. “Conspiracies and contacts and secret meeting places, god. You’ve been watching too many Hitchcock films.” He took off his glasses and set them on the desk, then rose and walked to his cupboard. He produced a razor and held it over his hand.

“I realized early on that it won’t work if I use my own blood to look through the glass... but if I feed them and you look, I think you’ll be very surprised. You asked to be part of this, Shad. Don’t ask for what you aren’t prepared to receive.”

With that, Harry sliced his palm deep and let the blood drip on the lenses. Shad was revulsed when he held the dripping spectacles towards him and pushed them onto his face. His grin was lunatic.

The blood absorbed into the dark glass. Shad’s face contorted, and the muscles in his neck tensed. His entire body trembled as if infused with electricity. He took the glasses off and threw them onto the bed, then seemed to go limp. He looked at the floor, then at Harry — his pallid complexion, his haunted eyes, his twitching mouth, his slashed hand dripping on the tiled floor.

Shad only said seven words to Harold Stafford in parting, and the two men never saw each other again. The copy editor took a week off of school sick, and when he came back, Harry had dropped out of Fulkes. The first four were, “I rescind my offer.”

Shad rose with effort from the bed and opened the door. On his way out he looked back at the reporter, who looked like he had died a week ago and no one had apprised him of the fact. He closed the door and whispered the last three words. “God help you.”

That summer on Champagne Island there were three unsolved murders of small children, all between 3 and 8. Their bodies were fished out of culverts or found in the bottoms of trash cans. The police, after finding bloodstained grey sweatsocks near the bodies, were unsure whether this was the same suspect as in the Fulkes murders or a copycat.

Harold Stafford suffered a stroke in late July that left him partly paralyzed and blind. A blood vessel burst in his brain, caused by a tumor in the occipital lobe, the part of the brain that controls vision, as well as a smaller mass in the frontal lobe, the center of reason and judgment. He was confined to his bed nearly four weeks. Two days before the fall semester began, he passed away in his sleep.

Shadrach Hutch attended the funeral on August 26. The grey in his mustache and in his temples had increased exponentially since April. His dreams had been plagued with images of the dead children and of Harry, his body twisted and crippled, lying in bed, shrieking in agony. He said a sober hello to Harry’s parents and friends and shared their surprise that a 23-year-old could be so quickly incapacitated by an embolism — an old man’s ailment, for God’s sakes. In truth he wasn’t surprised at all. The glasses had prophesied it with Harry’s blood. Shad had decided to abandon his scheme to blackmail him; there was no use in shaking down a damned man.

Harry’s glasses were put in storage, shuffled into a box along with other personal effects and some stacks of the Dispatch containing his byline, and stored in Harry’s mother’s attic. She refused to see her son buried in them; she felt they made him look undignified and ugly. While she was cleaning her son’s room the day before he was buried, she came across several crumpled pieces of paper. On them were jotted the first few lines of what looked like news copy, and what appeared to be bloodstains. She dismissed them, and they were burned along with the rest of the week’s refuse.

Harry had died only six months before he was to receive his diploma. Shad graduated valedictorian (by now his mustache over ninety percent white) in December; he gave a solemn, brief speech in which he spoke of fallen friends and of the perils of seeking shortcuts to what you want rather than working hard to get it.

“You lose your soul,” he told the graduates. Kirk’s friends, “Vulture” Vollman, Chuck Doulcette, and Mike Limpick were present at the ceremony that evening, decked in their robes. (Steve Borch had failed two classes and didn’t march with his buddies in 2001.) Vulture put two fingers between his teeth and emitted a loud whistle of approval at that; a comely female grad at the other end of the row (who looked not unlike the late Carolyn) shot him a dirty look.

Shad got a job as managing editor with a small newspaper in Athens, Georgia the following winter. For years he kept a copy of Harry’s yearbook picture in a frame on his desk. It reminded him that there are no easy paths to success, a point he made many times to the copy boys in his office and during speeches at local high schools and college journalism classes. To those who asked the significance, he simply said it was a guy who worked with him at the Champagne Island Dispatch, long dead now. He’d learned that lesson the hard way. Shad never went into details. He thought why bother; who would believe, or even comprehend, such things?

What the Chinese boy’s father said three millennia ago was true... if you lose your soul to the glass, as had Kestron and Harry and countless others, the next fool to look in the glass sees your face.